The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.
REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1393969
This article is part of the Research Topic Interoception and Mind-Body Interventions: Learning from Embodied, Respiratory, and Contemplative Practices View all 5 articles
Meditation and Interoception: A Conceptual Framework for the Narrative and Experiential Self
Provisionally accepted- South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, United States
The concept of the self is complex and there is no consensus on what the self is. However, there are emerging patterns in the literature that point to two different selves, the narrative and experiential self. The narrative self refers to a conceptual or representational knowledge of the self that extends across time and manifests in self-reflection and personality assessments. The experiential self refers to firstperson perception, moment-to-moment awareness, embodiment, and a sense of agency. These two selves are reliably linked to two distinct neural circuits, the default mode network (DMN) and the insula and salience network (SN). One of the consistent themes in the meditative and mindfulness literature is a change in the perspective of the self. In this paper, I will review how meditation alters those neural circuits providing a plausible mechanism that can explain the changes in the self. I also propose a rudimentary conceptual framework to account for some of the mixed results found throughout meditation literature. personality assessments (McCrae & Costa, 1997). The "I" or experiential self refers to first-person perception, moment-to-moment awareness, embodiment, and a sense of agency (Farb et al., 2007; Seth, 2013;Monti et al., 2022;Nave et al., 2021). In short, the narrative self is the part of the self that can be observed or described (e.g., outgoing, friendly etc.) while the experiential self eludes observation and description because it is the part of the self that is doing the observing and describing.Recent studies have begun to reliably identify distinct neural circuits associated with these different selves. The Narrative or "me" self has been consistently linked to the default mode network (DMN) (
Keywords: Meditation, interoception, mindfulness, The Experiential Self, The Narrative Self
Received: 29 Feb 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Gibson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jonathan E. Gibson, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.